Apple’s Head of Siri Remains Positive Despite ‘Ugly’ and Embarrassing Delays
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There’s little doubt that Siri hasn’t lived up to most people’s expectations. The once-promising voice assistant has entirely failed to reach its potential, and while Apple made us believe that iOS 18 might finally be the moment that everything changes, it’s starting to look like Sir’s problems may be more serious than we thought.
Earlier this week, Apple raconteur John Gruber posted an unusually scathing critique of Apple’s personalized Siri rollout under the headline Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino. While chastising himself for missing what should have been obvious signs that Apple’s promised Siri improvements were had about as much substance as a wispy cumulus cloud, Gruber also lamented that Siri doesn’t seem to have had its “MobileMe moment;” that, unlike the Steve Jobs era, when the team working on MobileMe was rightly castigated by Apple’s mercurial CEO for delivering woefully poor results, nobody on Tim Cook’s watch seems to be holding the Siri team accountable for its failure to launch.
Of course, it’s also fair to say that we don’t always know what goes on behind closed doors, especially within a company as infamously secretive as Apple. It’s likely that Steve Jobs’ brutal slamming of the MobileMe team leaked intentionally so outsiders would know how seriously Apple was taking its failure to deliver what was promised. There have undoubtedly been some tough conversations within the walls of Apple Park in recent weeks — we just haven’t heard about most of them.
After all, there are already indications that Apple is doing some housecleaning on the Siri team. A report in late January revealed that it was assigning a veteran “fixer” to the team, in the form of 36-year veteran Kim Vorrath, who has a reputation for getting wayward and challenging projects back on track. According to sources speaking with Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in January, Vorrath was given the assignment of “whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape.”
Now, Gurman has shared more insight into precisely how frustrated and disappointed Apple’s Siri leadership is. While there’s no word on anything coming from the upper echelons of Apple, Robby Walker, the senior director responsible for Siri, told the team that “delays to key features have been ugly and embarrassing,” and it’s been exacerbated by the decision to publicly promote the new features before they were ready.
Walker’s comments were supportive of his team, praising them for developing “incredibly impressive” features, and acknowledging that they “may be feeling angry, disappointed, burned out, and embarrassed after the features were postponed.” Insiders note that he’s not sure when the Siri improvements will actually launch, although people familiar with the matter have told Gurman that they’re not expected until next year “at the earliest.”
When Apple showed off Apple Intelligence during its June 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, the more personalized Siri was shown using a video mock-up. It was a concept video, plain and simple; “the company barely had a functional prototype,” Gurman said earlier this month.
As Walker told staff, this made the delays incredibly “ugly” as it “was not one of these situations where we get to show people our plan after it’s done.”
It’s still not clear who made this call, but Walker pointed the finger squarely at Apple’s marketing communications department:
“To make matters worse,” Walker said, Apple’s marketing communications department wanted to promote the enhancements. Despite not being ready, the capabilities were included in a series of marketing campaigns and TV commercials starting last year.
Mark Gurman
That’s the same group that was rabidly promoting Apple Intelligence as a key selling point of the iPhone 16 over six weeks before any of those AI features showed up. To be fair, Apple delivered on most of what Apple Intelligence promised by the time iOS 18.2 came along in December, but none of those were there when the iPhone 16 went on sale in September; the first ones didn’t arrive until iOS 18.1 landed in late October.
However, there’s one key feature — perhaps the most impressive one of all — that’s still missing in action, and we’re beginning to question whether it will come any time soon. It seems that Siri’s senior director isn’t convinced of this either.
According to Gurman’s sources, Walker “raised doubts about even meeting the current release expectations.” Apple is reportedly aiming for iOS 19 (presumably meaning iOS 19.0), but that “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” he said.
“We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walked said, adding that those “are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.” Nothing is carved in stone right now, and decisions are being made on a “case-by-case basis” as Apple’s software engineers continue to build iOS 19.
So far, it doesn’t look like any heads are rolling at Apple. There have been some shifts in the management ranks, mostly bringing on more senior execs under Apple AI boss John Giannandrea. Walker noted there’s “intense personal accountability” shared by Giannandrea and software chief Craig Federighi, both Senior Vice Presidents parallel to each other on Apple’s org chart, reporting directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
The good news is that the new Siri isn’t actually vaporware, but it’s also not in a state where Apple is willing to show it to anyone outside its inner circle. Walker said that the decision to delay the feature came down to quality issues. It has a 20% to 33% failure rate — essentially one in three — which means it’s a system that nobody could ever trust. Walker’s team is working on increasing those percentages “so that users get something they can really count on.”
The call to delay the features apparently came from Federighi, who voiced concerns to other senior execs over the past few weeks that the features weren’t working as advertised. It’s a problem that plagued other Apple Intelligence features, many of which Apple had initially hoped to launch in iOS 18.0.
Still, Walker told his Siri team they should be proud, and that the failure to produce solid results isn’t for a lack of trying. His staff put their “hearts and souls into this thing,” and were “giving everything they had” to make it work. He likened it to trying to swim to Hawaii:
We swam hundreds of miles — we set a Guinness Book for World Records for swimming distance — but we still didn’t swim to Hawaii […] And we were being jumped on, not for the amazing swimming that we did, but the fact that we didn’t get to the destination.
Walker suggested that it’s good that his team now has some breathing room, as many of them were likely stressing out over the possibility of shipping something that wasn’t ready for prime time. However, he still believes that, when all is said and done, Apple will “ship the world’s greatest virtual assistant.”
